Living With Injury
November 14, 2025 – June 2026
East Wing Galleries
Living With Injury is an exhibition that represents the predominantly Mexican American communities of Tucson’s southside who led one of the earliest and most successful environmental justice movements in the United States. The exhibition is organized by guest curators Dr. Sunaura Taylor (Disabled Ecologies Lab, UC Berkeley) and Alisha Vasquez (Mexican American Heritage and History Museum), and features work by artists, journalists, and researchers with deep connections to this history, including Alex! Jimenez, Franc Contreras, and Dr. Denise Moreno Ramírez. Drawing from both archival research and lived experience, the exhibition offers a space to reflect on collective memory, to acknowledge damages visited upon the community by defense industry pollution and environmental racism, and to celebrate the triumphs of southside organizers.
2025 marks the 40th anniversary of Tucsonans for a Clean Environment (TCE), one of the most formidable groups that organized in response to the contamination. That same year, local investigative journalist Jane Kay published a series of articles in the Arizona Daily Star that publicly confirmed what communities on the southside of Tucson had known for years: pollution from defense industries was contaminating the aquifer, making people sick, and in too many cases, killing them.
The TCE history is a story of loss, but it is also a story of how a community fought against racism; against long histories of colonialism, dispossession, and gentrification; against the negligence and exploitation of defense industries; and against the systemic neglect that left people having to deal with severe illnesses and diseases without support.
Building off the insights and questions of organizers and impacted community members, this exhibition asks: How do we begin to repair the vast trails of human and more than human injury that emerge from extractive and exploitative industries and policies? How do people, communities, and ecosystems live with illness and disability? How can collective remembering, storytelling, and memorializing create the world anew?
Living with Injury is a part of a city-wide initiative, Survival and Resistance: Remembering the Southside’s Environmental Justice Movement, a series of commemorations led by local institutions, artists, and activists across Tucson. Survival and Resistance celebrates southside resistance, survival, and healing through a broad range of community events and collaborations. The commemoration seeks to generate conversation and knowledge about environmental justice, health and illness, water justice, and Tucson’s Mexican American history by bringing people together across institutions, generations, and communities to remember, create, heal, and build new connections. The project is supported by Los Descendientes de Tucson and the Mexican American Heritage and History Museum; MOCA Tucson; Nuestras Raíces and the Pima County Library System; AZ Humanities, Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern AZ; the Disabled Ecologies Lab at UC Berkeley; Dr Daniel Sullivan; and numerous local artists, researchers, and community organizers, as well as impacted community members themselves.
Living With Injury is organized by guest curators Dr. Sunaura Taylor and Alisha Vasquez with support from the MOCA Tucson curatorial department.
Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, Teiger Foundation, Dr. Sunaura Taylor, Arizona Humanities, and MOCA Tucson’s Board of Trustees, Ambassador Council, and Members.
About the Artists
Nonfiction filmmaker Franc Gabriel Contreras was born and raised on the southside of Tucson, Arizona and he graduated from Sunnyside High School in 1981. His award-winning documentary short films have been shown at major film festivals around the world. Franc is also a veteran news correspondent reporting from across Latin America since 1996. His television and radio reports and documentaries have been broadcast worldwide to millions of people in most continents. Franc is currently working on a feature-length documentary that explores how the historic TCE aquifer contamination problem affected his community.
Alexandra (Alex!) Jimenez is a Chicana print-maker, illustrator, designer, mother, and public artist. Her artistic practice explores her connection to land, culture, and history as a fourth generation Mexican-American in Tucson, AZ. Alex began her career in the sciences, obtaining a BS in Animal Science from Cornell University. It was her love for discovery and exploration that led her to the science field and ultimately led her to the creative field. In 2014 she received a BFA in Visual Communication from the University of Arizona. Shortly after graduating she received the Research and Development grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts to pursue her typographical alphabet book, Abecedario del Sur. Since then, Alex has explored many forms of art making but her work has continued to center around the Sonoran Desert and the Southside of Tucson where she grew up. Recently, her love of community and collaboration led her into work as a public artist. Throughout 2021 and 2022 Alex worked as the first ever Artist-in-residence for Tucson Water and created opportunities to engage the public in art making about water. In 2022 Alex won funding for her first large scale public art piece “In Memory Of” which is a community engaged public art project that honors people who have died of COVID-19. The final memorial was installed in December 2023.
Dr. Denise Moreno Ramírez is the assistant director of the Earth League Secretariat at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University. She is a nationally recognized interdisciplinary scientist with community-engaged research and environmental justice expertise. She blends environmental science and medical anthropology and has worked on transdisciplinary scientific teams to solve environmental contamination and health problems. Moreno Ramírez directs the Secretariat led by co-chairs Peter Schlosser and Johan Rockström. Moreno Ramírez’s prior research spans 24 years. It includes designing virtual reality public-facing products with rural museums, making them hubs of local climate knowledge (Climate Heritage ILLuminated in Arizona), preserving oral histories of individuals living in hazardous contaminated spaces for future generation edification (Voices Unheard: Arizona’s Environmental History); understanding how volatile organic compounds interact in workplace air and impact low-wage, minority workers in beauty salons and auto shops in Arizona; developing peer education modules for Mexican Community Health Worker to devise environmental health programming at the community level; and partnering directly at hazardous contaminated sites (Superfund Sites) to establish community-led environmental research projects. She has received prestigious awards, such as the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (T32), a highly competitive award designed to support the most promising and talented researchers in the early stages of their careers. She also received the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice Fellowship from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, a recognition that underscores her significant contributions to the field of environmental justice. She was also awarded the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, a highly selective and competitive fellowship supporting promising early-career scholars. Her research has also been featured in national and international media, including The Guardian, Environmental Health News, Inside Climate News, and SXSW.
About the Curators
Dr. Sunaura Taylor is an artist and writer. Her most recent book is Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (University of California Press, 2024), which is a history of the struggle for environmental justice on the southside of Tucson. She is also the author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017), which received the 2018 American Book Award. Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets and her artworks have been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. She works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental justice, multispecies studies, and art practice. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley.
Alisha Vasquez is a krip, Chicana mama whose Tucsonense family has occupied the unceded homelands of the Tohono O’odham, Apache, and Yoeme people for six generations. Becoming a parent funneled all of her past experiences, knowledges, and beliefs into a new solidification of her values where she became a more joyous version of her analytical self. She honors her Mexican American-Tucsonense family, punk rock, living disabled, an acceptance and rejection of the academy, and existing within community as the epochs of her education until becoming a parent. Vasquez holds a BA in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Arizona and MA from San Francisco State University where her graduate work examined the rise neoliberal capitalism alongside multiple social movements in the United States, emphasizing disabled and Chicanx intersectional material realities. She taught middle school, high school, and college using these positions to resource the community. She is currently the Communications and Accessibility Manager Southwest Folklife Alliance / National Folklife Network; Co-Director of the Mexican American Heritage and History Museum at the Sosa-Carrillo House; and is following through on passion projects that use her training as an historian, community organizer, and educator to capture what it means to exist in so-called Tucson.
Join us on November 14 from 5:00 – 6:30 pm for a conversation between journalist Jane Kay and writer & historian Dr. Lydia Otero who will discuss their reporting and scholarship around contamination and contested landscapes in Tucson.
Image Credit: Sunaura Taylor, Speculative Aquifer. Pen and ink on rectangular paper; Franc Contreras, Ode to the Southside (video still), 2025. Courtesy the artist.